


Blue

by draculard



Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Frostbite, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, No spoilers for Treason, Pining, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 20:57:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19894237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: It's a long time before Eli learns how to see bruises on Thrawn's skin.





	Blue

It’s a long time before Eli learns how to see bruises on Thrawn’s skin.

He hides behind the bushes at Royal Imperial and watches Thrawn block the other cadets’ kicks with his unarmored forearms, watches steel-toed boots connect with Thrawn’s abdomen, with his ribs, watches knuckles graze his cheekbones and connect with his jaw.

Later, in their room, Eli pretends to be unconcerned. He gives Thrawn a brusque, “You’re sure you’re okay?” and before Thrawn even finishes his overly-long confirmation, Eli has crawled into the top bunk, pulled the covers over his head, and turned to face the wall.

He peeks when Thrawn peels off his uniform tunic. There are dark stains on the undershirt, hard to see against the black fabric, but when Thrawn pulls it over his head, it’s easy enough for even Eli to tell what caused those stains. Broken skin and blood mar Thrawn’s torso; there are scrapes on his hands and face, some of them still bleeding. He moves stiffly, clearly in pain.

But there are no bruises, Eli thinks. When Thrawn steps into the fresher, Eli rolls to face the wall again. His heart is hammering in his chest, but he feels strangely cold.

He does his best to sleep.

* * *

They share quarters on the _Blood Crow,_ an insult typically reserved for stormtroopers and lower-ranking enlisted men. Even a petty officer might reasonably be offended to learn he must share a room. 

But they no longer have bunk beds, at least. Their room is divided into two sections, with an archaic plastisteel partition separating Eli’s half from the fresher, and another partition separating the fresher from Thrawn’s half.

They have to share the shower, of course, but other than that, it’s entirely possible they might share this room without ever seeing each other at all.

Or so Eli tells himself. In truth, he’s with Thrawn every hour of the day cycle, and at night, their plastisteel partitions are almost always open. His desk chair has found a permanent home in Thrawn’s half of the room, arranged next to his desk for those inevitable moments when Thrawn wakes Eli up to look at something on his datapad. 

His datacards, too, are arranged on Thrawn’s desk instead of his own, if only because sometimes Eli feels obliged to educate Thrawn on some cultural reference or another. With both of their chairs in Thrawn’s room, it’s only natural to hold Holo Night there as well, and when Eli checks out novels from the shipboard datalibrary, it’s almost certainly for Thrawn’s edification rather than his own.

Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t have his own room at all. 

Tonight, for example, like many other nights, Eli wakes hours before his alarm is set to go off and lies in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

Trying to figure out what woke him.

It doesn’t take long — he’s heard it before. It’s the sound of Thrawn tossing and turning in the other room. Eli sits up and stays still a moment, listening, and once again he hears the soft, silky noise of the blankets moving, the mattress creaking, Thrawn’s hand hitting the bulkhead with a quiet, painful-sounding rap of the knuckles as he shifts. 

Eli hesitates, palms sweating, fingers nervously twisting in his own tatty military-issue blanket. He waits, ears pricked, for more evidence that Thrawn is having a nightmare. It happens sometimes; they never talk about it, but even at the Academy, Eli noticed how Thrawn would tense in his sleep, how his arms and legs would tangle in the blankets, how his breath would come out in a terrible rasp just moments before he finally opened his eyes.

He hears Thrawn’s hand strike the bulkhead again, louder and harder this time, and he can no longer convince himself to ignore it all. He tosses his blanket aside and pads through the partition on bare feet, rounding the corner into Thrawn’s half of the room cautiously. He half-expects to find the room awash in a faint red glow, to find Thrawn already awake and sitting up in bed, calm (as he always is after a nightmare, somehow) and curious about Eli’s unexpected presence in his doorway.

But Thrawn is still asleep, his eyebrows knotted, his jaw clenched so tightly that Eli can hear his teeth grinding against each other. He’s lying at an angle on the bed, his head and hands pressed hard against the wall. He almost looks like he’s pushing against it — keeping something away, trying to get out.

“Thrawn,” Eli whispers, standing a bit away from the bed, just in case. Thrawn twitches, one of his hands curling into a fist. Other than that, he doesn’t move a muscle, and Eli resigns himself to more desperate measures.

Bracing himself, he puts a hand on Thrawn’s shoulder and gives it a shake. 

The result is a little anticlimactic; Thrawn goes still at his touch, the tension leaving his body. A moment later, his eyes open, lids heavy and glowing dimly.

“Eli,” he murmurs. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, they look clearer, sharper. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Eli says. “Sorry to wake you.”

Thrawn doesn’t respond. He rearranges the blankets silently, straightening them out over his legs, wincing almost imperceptibly as he flexes his hand. 

But there’s no bruise on his hand that Eli can see, and there are no dark shadows under his eyes the next day, either.

Perhaps, despite everything, he slept well.

* * *

“Frostbite,” Thrawn says decisively. Eli pales and leans forward, looking at his own bare hand resting in Thrawn’s gloved one. Sure enough, there’s a small blue spot on the tip of Eli’s trigger finger.

“Aw, kriff,” Eli mutters. “How?”

“Temperatures were quite low due to the coolant leakage,” Thrawn says, still examining Eli’s hand. Behind him, the affected area had been sealed off — and this time, he and Eli were safely on the other side of the leak. They’d spent two hours trapped in there as temperatures dropped, until Thrawn had finally found a way to force open the door without damaging the seal.

“Your ears are also affected,” says Thrawn, “though less so. As is the tip of your nose.”

Carefully, Eli touches his nose and finds it raw and aching — much unlike that blue spot on his finger, which is totally, utterly dead.

“It will heal,” Thrawn assures him.

“My finger, too?”

“All of it,” says Thrawn. He releases Eli’s hand — _finally_ , Eli thinks, though he doesn’t actually feel the relief he thinks he should; instead he feels a peculiar, almost unidentifiable sense of loss — and slips off his gloves, examining his hands under the eye-searing corridor light. Eli’s anxiety, temporarily abated, surges back with a vengeance.

“Are you…?” he asks, but when he leans forward to check Thrawn’s hands, they look perfectly fine.

“Yes,” Thrawn says gravely. “Frostbitten.”

“You _are_?” Eli, already in the middle of rocking back on his heels, leans forward for a third time, nearly losing his balance in the quick reversal. He scans Thrawn’s hands again. “Where?”

Thrawn traces a gently-curving line down his index finger, then indicates a section on his thumb, then on his little and ring fingers as well. Try as he might, Eli can’t see anything — and Thrawn must notice, because he curls his fingers in and rotates his wrist, and suddenly Eli can see all the areas on Thrawn’s hand where the skin doesn’t wrinkle.

“Oh, _kriff_ ,” Eli says again. 

“You see the discoloration now?” Thrawn asks, once more tracing the dead zones. Somehow, Eli does, and he’s not sure how he missed it before. The frostbite is a deeper blue than the rest of Thrawn’s skin, landing somewhere between the shades of indigo and violet.

“Will that heal?” Eli asks nervously. “I mean, it’s a lot more extensive than mine.”

“It will heal,” says Thrawn, ever confident. As he slips his gloves back on, he suddenly averts his eyes, avoiding Eli's gaze. “I’ve had far worse than this,” he says.

* * *

From then on, Eli is more than capable of spotting bruises on Thrawn’s skin, and he gets better at it every day. 

At night, in their shared quarters, he watches Thrawn take his tunic off and sees the scars lining his torso for the very first time. They’re faded, barely discernible from the lighter blue that surrounds them, but they’re there: blaster burns and shrapnel scars across his chest and shoulders, marks left by vibroblades and glass against the lines of his abdomen. No one Eli’s ever met in the Empire has scars like those; anything nonfatal can be knitted back together in a bacta tank and is sure to fade entirely with time.

He sees the bruises on Thrawn’s knuckles and under his eyes after a bad night’s sleep. Sometimes, Eli sleeps right through the night with no indication of trouble from Thrawn’s bed, and when he wakes up, those bruises are still there.

It’s taken him so long to notice the bruises. He wonders what Thrawn dreams about.

He wonders what else he’s missing.


End file.
